Managing Filters

What do you want to do?

Introduction

Filters selectively monitor chat rooms messages and execute a specific action if the filter criteria are met. For example, you can create a filter to show a notification whenever a specific user sends a message to a specific chat room. Note that Chat History cannot be enabled for filters.

Filters

Filters consist of a set of rules that you apply to messages to determine their behavior. Messages that match the specified criteria are posted to the special type of filter chat room. Filters are displayed at the bottom of My Chat on the main window of the Group Chat. A symbol next to the name indicates that it is a filter.

The Ego and Sent filters are created automatically by the Group Chat.

Ego filter: Set up, by default, to filter any messages that contain your name in the text area, so that you are aware of any messages posted that contain your name.

Sent filter: Keeps a record of all messages that you send during a session.

Creating Filters

You can create filters to monitor specific chat rooms, users, or content. You can create a completely new filter, or you can create a new filter based on an existing one.

To create a filter from the Preferences dialog box

On the Connect menu, click Preferences.

On the left navigation bar, click Filters.

To create a new filter, click Add, and then do one of the following:

To create a new filter that uses the default ego filter settings, click Create new ego filter.

To create a new filter that uses the default sent filter settings, click Create new sent-chat filter.

To create a new filter that is a copy of another filter, select a filter in the list, and then click Copy.

In the Name box, type a name for the filter.

In the Match messages in drop-down list, select the filter criteria.

If you select IM, you see a list of From choices

If you select Specified chat rooms or IM, click Add to specify which chat rooms or IM contacts to select. You can select multiple items by holding the SHIFT key.

To filter for text, select Where message text contains, and then enter the text. The filter will match words. To match on text phrases, include quotation marks around the text. For example, “new Group Chat features.”

Click OK.

You can also create a new filter by clicking the New Filter button or by first selecting a chat room from My Chat. Creating a filter in this manner is equivalent to clicking Filters in the left navigation bar of the Preferences dialog box, and then clicking Add.

To create a filter

Do one of the following:

Click the New Filter button.

In My Chat, right-click one or more chat rooms, and then click Filter Chat on Selected Chat rooms.

Modifying Filters

Make any changes to the chat room, user, or word filters, and then click OK.

To view and edit Ego filter settings

In My Chat List, right-click the Ego filter, and then click Edit Filter.

To change the chat rooms to filter on, in the list, click a value. The default is any group chat room or IM.

To change the users to filter on, in the From list, click a value. The default is any user.

To change the text to filter on, select the where message text contains check box. By default, this check box is selected, and the default values are your first name, last name, and SIP URI (someone@example.com). You can add values such as nicknames or your alias.

By default, the filter matches whole words, but it is not case-sensitive. To match case, select the Match Case check box.

Using Regular Expression Filters

Regular expressions are strings that are used to describe or match sets of strings, according to certain syntax rules. These strings can be used as search queries for filters by typing them in as you would a regular search query.

Group Chat supports Microsoft .NET Framework regular expressions. The following table describes some of the regular expressions syntax and behavior. For details about .NET Framework regular expressions, see Regular Expression Language Elements on MSDN.

Regular expressions syntax

Characters

Description

()

Groups sequences of characters. Matches must include the entire character sequence.

[]

Matches any one of the characters in the brackets.

[^]

Matches any character that is not in the brackets.

[firstChar -lastChar]

Matches any character in a range of characters.

{n}

Specifies exactly n matches.

{n,m}

Specifies at least n, but no more than m, matches. For example, the string color{0,1}r searches for a 0 or 1 instance of the letter ‘o’ and matches either color or colour.

x|y

Matches either x or y. For example, 'z|food' matches "z" or "food". '(z|)ood' matches "zood" or "food". This is the logical OR operator.

*

Matches zero or more occurrences of a character.

+

Matches one or more occurrences of a character.

\d

Matches a digit (any numeral from 0 through 9).

\D

Matches anything that is not a digit, such as @, #, $, or an alphabetic character.

\w

Matches any alphanumeric character. This is equivalent to [a-zA-Z_0-9].

\W

Matches any non-alphanumeric character. This can include special characters: /<>?;':"[]{}\| and so on.